The Official Rackspace Blog » open sourcehttp://www.rackspace.com/blog
Learn more about the #1 Managed Cloud company. Read recent and most popular posts on subjects like the cloud, our customers and partners, our products and the famous Rackspace culture.Fri, 31 Jul 2015 20:29:11 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.5OpenPOWER: Opening The Stack, All The Way Downhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/openpower-opening-the-stack-all-the-way-down/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/openpower-opening-the-stack-all-the-way-down/#commentsTue, 16 Dec 2014 17:00:27 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37597Rackspace has publicly announced our affiliation with the OpenPOWER Foundation, and we are now an official member. OpenPOWER is a community dedicated to opening access to the lowest-level parts of servers: chips, buses, boards, firmware, and so forth. We anticipate that this movement will bring increased freedom and value to two other communities that we participate in: OpenStack and the Open Compute Project. We think that by working within this new community, Rackspace can deliver improved performance, value, and features for our customers.

That’s the news in a nutshell, but perhaps you’d like a little more detail. Why now? Why OpenPOWER? And what’s next? Those are good questions. The answers may surprise you.

Why now?

Rackspace has actually been involved with OpenPOWER for more than 18 months. We worked amongst the founders for months before the foundation launched, and remained engaged after launch, but chose to remain quiet. We’ve been evaluating the technology and the movement for quite some time. Both the current results and future potential are so promising that we are preparing to build an OpenPOWER-based, Open Compute platform. And it will run OpenStack services.

We intend to work alongside our partners in all three communities to achieve this goal. Today, we publicly communicate that intent.

Why OpenPOWER?

In the world of servers, it’s getting harder and more costly to deliver the generational performance and efficiency gains that we used to take for granted. There are increasing limitations in both the basic materials we use, and the way we design and integrate our systems. In hindsight, one could say that Rackspace started to address these issues by starting at the top of the stack, and moving down; first with OpenStack, then with Open Compute. As we were building OnMetal, our single-tenant, bare-metal Cloud Servers, we began to delve into firmware for Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) and systems management, a still-closed frontier. Moving forward, as we consider the performance levels we want to provide customers with future cloud offerings, we’ll need to start moving into chips, memory, and storage.

And we don’t want to do development in this realm alone. We want the open source community to be involved. OpenStack developers may not think much about these things today, but they will in the future. Linux and Open Compute developers have been encountering these challenges for a while.

The OpenPOWER community has grown steadily over the last year, along with supported applications, operating systems and peripherals. Joining OpenPOWER puts us in great company. Currently, 80 organizations are represented, including Google, IBM, Canonical, Nvidia, Samsung, and Mellanox. Key OpenPOWER members have made meaningful contributions to OpenStack, and we hope to help OpenPOWER build fruitful partnerships within the Open Compute Project. OpenPOWER is also partnered with the Linux Foundation.

OpenPOWER brings an increasingly open firmware stack, and deeper access to chips, memory, and storage than anywhere else. This is unprecedented, and it invites the open source community to participate at all layers.

What’s next?

In the coming months, we’ll engage with our partners in the community to design and build an OpenPOWER-based, Open Compute platform. We want to see that platform contributed to Open Compute, complete with a highly-functional open source firmware set.

We aim to put that platform into production at Rackspace, integrated with OpenStack cloud services.

The way we use servers is already changing. We’re already seeing the lines beginning to blur between conventional processors, memory, and storage. End users will continue to ask for more, and we need the software and solutions to enable them. We need solutions that sweep the whole stack, from hardware, to firmware, to operating systems, to applications. And we want them to be open. OpenStack and Open Compute have an opportunity to get involved early, and drive this change.

It’s our vision that OpenPOWER enables OpenStack and Open Compute developers to work all the way down the stack. Where Open Compute opened and revolutionized data center hardware and OpenStack opened up cloud software and infrastructure-as-a-service, OpenPOWER is doing the same for the last black boxes in our servers: chips, buses, and firmware.

We want our systems open, all the way down. This is a big step in that direction.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/openpower-opening-the-stack-all-the-way-down/feed/0OpenStack Summit Paris: OpenStack Is All About Choicehttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/openstack-summit-paris-openstack-is-all-about-choice/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/openstack-summit-paris-openstack-is-all-about-choice/#commentsMon, 03 Nov 2014 16:00:48 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37312In the technology industry, there is always disruption. That was one of the many messages OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce hammered home in front of a capacity crowd Monday during his keynote to kickoff OpenStack Summit Paris.

Every industry, he said, faces disruption: banking, big media, automotive. In this new “software-defined economy” everyone competes with a startup.

This has created an environment where change is easier than ever before and we can move faster than ever before. And, according to Bryce, “people have more choice than ever before.”

OpenStack and the cloud offer that choice by kicking over the old model of passive consumption through which technology buyers bought what vendors told them to buy and upgraded when they were told to. There was very little choice.

“The model we’re in now is all about getting what we want,” he said.

Bryce compared the cloud to Lego blocks, which recently took the crown as the No. 1 toy company in the world. Like Legos, the cloud provides the platform that empowers its users to build the environment they want and need. There’s choice. Just running standard, off-the-shelf software is no longer enough.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, during his portion of the keynote, said open source is redefining the tech industry and OpenStack is the next open source blockbuster.

“You are on the right side of history,” he told the crowd.

OpenStack users have the power to choose what drives real business value and innovation, Bryce said. To illustrate that point, he welcomed to the keynote stage several large companies using OpenStack today to drive real business value.

Jose Maria San Jose Juarez, global head of innovation in technology at BBVA, said the global bank interacts with its customers through its apps and software. It needs to be agile and needs to work quickly. As a company, it needs to present its developers more options so they can take a programmatic approach. OpenStack, he said, delivers BBVA agility, the ability to continuously deploy and scalability, all of which would be nearly impossible with a traditional infrastructure.

BMW, too, is seeing the benefits of choice. With a luxurious BMW i8 on stage behind him, BMW’s Dr. Stefon Lenz said the automaker wants its cars to be innovative, elegant and efficient, which is also how it wants its infrastructure. Lenz said he learned the value of OpenStack when he installed Icehouse by himself on an old server. It was that experiment that helped he and his team understand the cloud and the advantages of OpenStack.

And Matt Haines, vice president of cloud engineering and operations for Time Warner Cable said the second largest cable provider in the U.S. was able to get up and running on OpenStack in just six months in its quest to make it easier to build and manage apps and delivery on its promise of delivering customers any content, any time, anywhere on any device.

“Today, OpenStack is mature and up to the task,” he said, adding that Time Warner Cable is using OpenStack to drive real changes in business.

Despite the many benefits of OpenStack, there is still a lot of work to do, some of the customers said.

Ruchi Bhargava, IT hybrid cloud product owner at Intel, said during a panel discussion that OpenStack upgrades need to be easier, OpenStack needs to integrate better with legacy infrastructure investments and federated identity with public clouds needs to work in production.

Lenz added that release cycles and changes from release to release are challenging and OpenStack should work toward more stability. Lenz said that for OpenStack to continue its success, the community has to get back to the basics and focus on the core platform what makes OpenStack valuable its users.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/openstack-summit-paris-openstack-is-all-about-choice/feed/0At OSCON, Rackers Will Showcase All Things Open Sourcehttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/at-oscon-rackers-will-showcase-all-things-open-source/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/at-oscon-rackers-will-showcase-all-things-open-source/#commentsWed, 16 Jul 2014 15:00:00 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=36246OSCON 2014 is upon is. We’ll have a number of Rackspace specialists on-hand throughout the event talking about all things open source. We’re pumped to head to Portland to highlight the projects we’ve contributed to and collaborate and innovate with the open source community.

As co-founders, contributors and collaborators in the OpenStack community, Rackspace is proud to be part of such a large network of inspiring open source innovators.

We have a lot on tap for OSCON 2014, here’s a look at what we’re up to:

Feature Discussion

Wednesday, July 23 at 10:40 a.m.Driving Innovation and Next Generation Application Architectures with Open Source (Jesse Noller, Rackspace; Brandon Philips, CoreOS)Join Rackspace and CoreOS as they discuss/examine that developers are beginning to see a new set of disruptive technologies come into play – beyond virtual machine, beyond just configuration management. We’re beginning to see the platforms of next generation applications enter the open source arena. These tools and technologies, built in the open, open source, open hardware, and open standard will define a new generation of applications – applications that run without regard to region, locality, or knowledge of the underlying hardware (or lack thereof).

Presentations

We also have a number of Rackers presenting on a host of exciting open source topics. Here’s what’s in store:

Ignite OSCON

Racker Everett Toews will present during Ignite OSCON, a high-energy, fast-paced technology show-and-tell where presenters have five minutes to talk about anything – any topic is fair game as long as its interesting. Ignite OSCON is Sunday, July 20 at 5:30 p.m.

More Goodness

The Book Signing

Racker Everett Toews will also be singing copies OpenStack Operations Guide, a book he co-authored. The signing is from 3:40 p.m. to 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, July 23 in the O’Reilly Authors’ booth. There will be 25 complimentary copies of the book given away during the signing.

The Booth

Be sure to swing by our booth (No. 327) between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Tuesday, July 22 and Wednesday, July 23. Take the Rackspace Cloud Code Challenge to get some swag and be entered to win a drone. And while you’re there, check out the discussions by our in-booth presenters on a bunch of cool topics including:

Docker 1.0 101: Intro to Docker, and what the stable release looks like

CoreOS and Docker on Rackspace OnMetal

We know that’s a lot – but it wouldn’t be OSCON without a ton of great information.

We look forward to seeing you all in Portland next week.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/at-oscon-rackers-will-showcase-all-things-open-source/feed/0A Perfect Complement: OpenStack At Cloud Foundry Summithttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-perfect-complement-openstack-at-cloud-foundry-summit/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-perfect-complement-openstack-at-cloud-foundry-summit/#commentsMon, 09 Jun 2014 15:00:09 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35914Cloud Foundry Summit kicks off today in San Francisco. As an open source project, Cloud Foundry is growing rapidly and is getting more industry adoption. This summit is designed to bring together Cloud Foundry developers and operators for community interaction and discussions. And the summit’s schedule is packed with sessions showcasing business and technical topics.

I have been interested in Cloud Foundry for about two years, and in that time, I have watched it grow, change owners, and get completely open sourced. Cloud Foundry’s history is not that different from OpenStack’s: both started out as closed source projects, both gathered a lot of community support, and now the Cloud Foundry Foundation is in the works. Cloud Rackspace is committed to advancing this open source project and has joined in forming the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Platinum sponsor.

When I first learned about Cloud Foundry, I was excited by how it aimed to simplify the life of a developer. Developers like writing code and do not want to spend their time thinking about how to deploy their application and the underlying infrastructure. Cloud Foundry solves the infrastructure problem by enabling developers to deploy their application with a single command line.

I will be presenting at the Cloud Foundry Summit along with IBM’s Animesh Singh and Jason Anderson about integration between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. If you have a chance, check out our session (Tuesday, June 10 at 5 p.m.) and learn about how the two open source projects complement each other.

Business Track: Cloud Foundry and OpenStack – A Marriage Made in Heaven!Bring the world’s best IaaS to the world’s best PaaS. In this talk IBM and Rackspace are going to share their experiences of running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack. The talk will focus on how Cloud Foundry and OpenStack complement each other, how they technically integrate using Cloud provider interface (CPI), how could we automate OpenStack setup for Cloud Foundry deployments, and what are some of the best practices for configuring a scalable environment.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-perfect-complement-openstack-at-cloud-foundry-summit/feed/0Choosing An Open Source Content Management System [Infographic]http://www.rackspace.com/blog/choosing-an-open-source-content-management-system-infographic/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/choosing-an-open-source-content-management-system-infographic/#commentsThu, 29 May 2014 15:00:29 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35773Open source Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! have now been around for a decade or so, doing their part to make the internet a more manageable place. At its core, a CMS structures the experience of developing, managing and consuming a website. Chances are good that a big chunk of the content you’ll read on the web today (including this post) is being delivered through an open source CMS. FedEx and The Washington Post are using Drupal. Coca-Cola France and Sony Music are using WordPress. Harvard and IHOP use Joomla!

From humble beginnings (Drupal’s roots go back to university students in Antwerp in 2000) to powering some of the biggest sites on the planet, open source CMS platforms have evolved into world-class software platforms. Each one has been developed and maintained by a community of thousands. Not only is each one free to download, but the open source format means that the platform is continuously being improved to support new challenges and technologies.

Use the infographic below to decipher some of the key differences between these three popular CMS platforms.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here; choosing the right platform depends on your goals, technical expertise and the desired functionality of your site. In addition to hosting thousands of deployments across open source CMS platforms, Rackspace Digital also specializes in massively scalable enterprise content management systems like Adobe Experience Manager and the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/choosing-an-open-source-content-management-system-infographic/feed/0The Copyrightability Of APIs In The Land Of OpenStackhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-copyrightability-of-apis-in-the-land-of-openstack/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-copyrightability-of-apis-in-the-land-of-openstack/#commentsFri, 16 May 2014 17:01:21 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35640Last week, the Federal Circuit overturned the District Court judgment in Oracle v. Google, finding that the Java API is copyrightable. This move overturns the expectations of businesses and developers and is likely to negatively impact how they leverage APIs going forward. We have been thinking a lot about the ruling since it came down, putting together our thoughts.

To start with, we are very disappointed with the ruling. The Federal Circuit very clearly got it wrong. While Rackspace has no stake in the fight over Android, we do have a stake in the legal status of APIs. As developers, we consume APIs of all kinds every day. As a company, almost all of our products are exposed to the world only as APIs. As we wrote in our brief to the court last year, we think that APIs are inherently functional – as the name suggests, they are just “interfaces” between two different pieces of software. Copyrighting APIs makes no more sense than copyrighting the little bumps on the top of Lego bricks.

Second, this decision validates our longstanding position that OpenStack needs its own APIs. For some time there have been elements in the OpenStack community that have tried to build OpenStack interfaces (and businesses) on top of AWS APIs. We have always thought that was a bad idea from an engineering perspective: As a community, we don’t want to cede control over what we do in OpenStack to other cloud vendors. As developers, we don’t want to burden ourselves with having to worry about subtle semantic differences and bug-for-bug compatibility with a platform we don’t control.

But last week’s decision gives us a new reason. As GigaOm has already pointed out, using Amazon APIs is now a legal risk, one which we don’t have to take.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-copyrightability-of-apis-in-the-land-of-openstack/feed/0ZeroVM, UTSA Partnership To Investigate Future Cloud Use Caseshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/zerovm-utsa-partnership-to-investigate-future-cloud-use-cases/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/zerovm-utsa-partnership-to-investigate-future-cloud-use-cases/#commentsThu, 08 May 2014 17:00:31 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35596ZeroVM is an exciting technology. It holds the promise of making cloud computing remarkably faster, lighter, more secure and more affordable.

Based on Chromium Native Client (NaCl), ZeroVM virtualization creates a secure isolated execution environment that can run a single thread or application. Most importantly, ZeroVM can be easily embedded inside of existing storage systems.

This is a paradigm changer. It enables developers to push application to data, rather than today’s model of pulling data to application.

Many of the best tools developers use everyday are open source projects that have been built on a foundation of long-term support by a corporate sponsor. Partnerships like these ensure that projects have the resources they need to flourish and build a thriving independent community of contributors.

Rackspace’s sponsorship of ZeroVM runs deep. The company has formed a three-year partnership with the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to undertake advanced research projects that investigate how to make cloud computing with ZeroVM more valuable for everyone.

UTSA doctoral candidates and professors will delve into core issues including the ZeroVM security model, and location-aware scheduling algorithms. They will also investigate new paradigms for data analysis that can be enabled by ZeroVM; such as multi-tenant massively parallel cloud-based database management, big data extraction, and large-scale image search.

The university is leading the way in enabling next generation hyperscale cloud infrastructure. We’re delighted to be able to partner with them on this important research, made possible by Rackspace’s dedication to supporting ZeroVM technology development.

There is a huge range of challenging use cases that ZeroVM makes possible. Rackspace’s partnership with UTSA enables developers to explore.

We’ll be filling you in more in coming months, about the research projects’ leadership and progress. Stay tuned!

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/zerovm-utsa-partnership-to-investigate-future-cloud-use-cases/feed/0Project Solum Goes Full Steam Ahead To Milestone 1http://www.rackspace.com/blog/project-solum-goes-full-steam-ahead-to-milestone-1/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/project-solum-goes-full-steam-ahead-to-milestone-1/#commentsMon, 28 Apr 2014 21:40:26 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35498After less than six months in development, Project Solum has accomplished the first development milestone (Milestone 1). This important event allows deployment of code from Github via Heat to generate a running appdeployed to Docker containers using a generalized (Heroku) build pack for the app stack.

You can see a short demo of Solum M1 code in action:

While it is still early days for Solum, an open source application lifecycle management platform, we have several more milestones planned on our roadmap. Development is progressing at full steam to ensure we reach these subsequent milestones.

Solum Summit And Design Workshop

Last month, the Solum community conducted our secondface-to-face Solum Summit and Design Workshop. Red Hat hosted the event in Raleigh, NC. It was well-attended and featured participation from Rackspace, Red Hat, Mirantis, Numergy and Oracle. The two-day semi-annual workshops provide a forum for the Solum community to come together and have a focused set of discussions on project vision, design and roadmap.

Reaching Milestone 1 and the success of the recent summit show Solum’s momentum and illustrate that our community’s vision is taking shape.

Project Solum was initiated in November 2013 to make OpenStack clouds easy to consume for app developers. A few months ago, Rackspace expressed interest in joining the proposed Cloud Foundry Foundation along with IBM, Pivotal, VMware, EMC, HP and SAP, which raised speculation that Rackspace might be abandoning project Solum. In reality, Solum development has continued at a good pace. Rackspace views Solum and Cloud Foundry as complementary – each platform serves different customer needs. Adrian Otto, Principal Architect at Rackspace, spelled out these differences in a blog post. Meanwhile, Rackspace continues to invest in Solum as a platform that is natively designed for OpenStack.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/project-solum-goes-full-steam-ahead-to-milestone-1/feed/0Open Source Databases And The Cloud: Takeaways From The Percona MySQL Conference [Video]http://www.rackspace.com/blog/open-source-databases-and-the-cloud-takeaways-from-the-percona-mysql-conference-video/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/open-source-databases-and-the-cloud-takeaways-from-the-percona-mysql-conference-video/#commentsTue, 22 Apr 2014 20:00:44 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=35443In the last few years we have seen new distributions emerge, like MariaDB and Percona Server, as viable alternatives to MySQL. These new distributions create more choice for users with increased focus on performance and offer new configurations that empower users to push the limits of their database and optimize in new ways.

At the Percona MySQL conference earlier this month in Santa Clara, Calif., Rackspace connected with the MySQL community to learn about new innovations in the open source database space and speak directly with the community about what DBAs want from a managed database service. This year’s conference was especially exciting and boasted sessions and keynotes around revolutionary changes to a very stable ecosystem.

At the conference, Daniel Morris and I (Sean Anderson) sat down with SiliconANGLE’s “The Cube” to discuss the conference, the community and the work Rackspace is doing in the data space.

Feel free to watch the entire interview, but it is important to take note of these four key points from the conversation:

Data lives in the cloud.

Increasingly data is generated by applications that live natively in the cloud. The ease and scalability of the cloud allows for the generation of countless data points, logs and metrics. This data is used to optimize user interactions and create new functionality in applications that are termed “data driven.” Since this data was bred in the cloud it only makes sense to store and process it in the cloud. Data can only move at the speed of light so there are complications in moving data between environments. This is prompting developers to seriously consider having their data only exist in the cloud. This brings about new concerns with the integrity of data and congruency of database systems that are being tackled by the community.

“We don’t exist in a world where it’s cloud or nothing.”

Daniel makes a very staunch point here that in the world of Rackspace it’s not “cloud computing or nothing.” The reality is that moving to the cloud is a journey. Each company/application/initiative is somewhere in that journey. There are applications that may never live in the cloud whether due to compliance or performance concerns or other factors. The way that Rackspace adds value in this journey is by helping them make informed and prudent choices based on the recommendations of experts along with specific considerations of their applications. Having hybrid capabilities means that we do not shy away from making the best infrastructure recommendation for the desired workload/operation.

The roadmap is important.

The emergence of various cloud providers gives users choices – they can choose the cloud provider that best fits their lens of the future. Every provider has a different strategy. It doesn’t mean that one is right and the other is wrong, but one provider may be better aligned with your business needs than others. Choosing a cloud provider with a roadmap that mirrors your future technology aspirations is key to success. As open communities accelerate new technology innovation it becomes more important to have expertise behind these new technologies. We are seeing users pay close attention to the various providers’ roadmaps to understand which will be best equipped to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. Faith in that roadmap gives developers the peace of mind that they will have the right teams in place if new problems arise.

Open means more than open source.

Daniel points out that Rackspace doesn’t approach the idea of open to just be defined as open source software. While an open strategy consists of open source technologies, it encompasses more than just the application. Open means that you can port a workload or application between providers and platforms without disruptive redesign. Proprietary software will continue to be a part of an open strategy without the added benefit of the communities. Being open means that development, deployment and growth are all free of the constraints of any specific technology provider.

The future is bright for the open ecosystem of data technologies, whether they are traditional open-sourced databases or new data platforms. Rackspace will continue to lead in contributions to open initiatives like Trove. SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier makes a great point in the video that “open-source wins.” That point is validated by the increased emphasis put on new open data technologies. Daniel wraps up the sentiment nicely by saying “Just when people think MySQL is running out of steam, the community rallies around it to figure out as workloads change, as things move to the cloud, how do we bring MySQL forward?” While we don’t have all of the answers about how this will play out, we are excited to be a part of this revolution in data.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/open-source-databases-and-the-cloud-takeaways-from-the-percona-mysql-conference-video/feed/0A Tale Of Two Approaches To The Platform Service Layer: Cloud Foundry And Solumhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-tale-of-two-approaches-to-the-platform-service-layer-cloud-foundry-and-solum/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-tale-of-two-approaches-to-the-platform-service-layer-cloud-foundry-and-solum/#commentsTue, 11 Mar 2014 21:47:08 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=34899Getting an application designed, tested and running, then updating and improving it is no easy task — even in the best of times. There is a continuing quest for tooling that delivers automation of this work to allow more focus on what matters most: fast, efficient development. This automation is increasingly sought via a platform service layer that abstracts the compute, networking and storage details of the infrastructure service layer — offering simplification for application developers and the cloud operators who support them.

This tooling is often referred to as application “Platform-as-a-Service” or “PaaS.” Unfortunately, this term tends to mask a distinction we’ve found in two types of customer needs leading to different preferred approaches to use of a platform service layer.

Some customers value a platform service layer’s abstracting away the infrastructure service layer as much as possible. They are cloud operators comfortable with minimalist platform use of the infrastructure layer for the benefit of cross-cloud portability, which is the architectural approach of Cloud Foundry.

Warner Music Group, for example, has discussed this as a Cloud Foundry user where they’ve built an architecture decoupled from the underlying infrastructure. They build once and run the apps in their platform environment on any infrastructure they choose. Rackspace recently joined in forming the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Platinum sponsor as we serve customers with needs aligned with this approach.

Other customers want to maximize leverage of their existing infrastructure service layer in deploying a platform service layer. They value deeper integration of the platform and infrastructure layers for more seamless control of apps from the platform layer down to the infrastructure resources and want to avoid the operator pain of running a platform layer that involves operating services overlapping their existing cloud capabilities (Orchestration, Monitoring, Logging, Routing / Load Balancing, Image Storage, etc.).

Subbu Allamaraju and Kamal Muralidharan of eBay, for example, have discussed this as Solum contributors: “For a cloud operator, this is operationally efficient because Solum becomes just one additional control plane component to support. For users this means an integrated user experience.” Rackspace, eBay, Red Hat and others in the OpenStack community announced project Solum last October and are actively developing with the goal of serving needs aligned with this approach. Solum is a componentized platform service layer designed for use in OpenStack deployments whether as a standalone platform layer or as a layer within a broader platform that allows for the elimination of this overlap and enables greater efficiency for operators — as Red Hat has explained in how they are interested in using Solum for OpenShift.

There’s sometimes a belief that every technology, given enough time, converges on a single “right” solution. This isn’t what we actually experience in the marketplace. Today we have data centers filled with machines running Windows sitting next to machines running one of a variety of Linux distributions. We run the world’s largest OpenStack public cloud using XEN hypervisors while we are also one of the biggest resellers of VMware.

It’s time to retire the idea of winner-take-all technology. Different kinds of customers need different kinds of technology to help them succeed. This is a reality we at Rackspace acknowledge at all times in our customer-centric approach as a leading cloud service provider.

Rackspace believes in open technologies and was very pleased when Pivotal announced its intent to put the Apache 2.0-licensed Cloud Foundry project into the hands of a new foundation. Many developers, indeed the majority of developers, may not need to concern themselves with the operational details of Heat Orchestrations or exactly how a Cinder block storage volume should be handled after removing it from a server, so Cloud Foundry could be the perfect platform service layer for them. We look forward to doing what we can to help bring our deep expertise in building open source community to support this new planned foundation.

Solum aims to make life easier for application developers and manage their work beyond the simple deployment available currently in OpenStack. We’ve mapped out functionality we hope will guide and support developers through the dev/test/release cycle by integrating measurement, rapid response and build automation. These are important features that benefit from deep integration with infrastructure-level cloud capabilities like those in OpenStack.

Platform approaches are not all the same — similar perhaps, but not the same. Each one may fit a particular use case better than another. Developers, and the cloud operators supporting them, have massively different needs and we do ourselves a disservice as a community to think otherwise. The truth is that there’s more than one type of platform approach because not every customer has the same needs.

Rackspace believes in meeting customer needs — that means staying fluent with multiple methods and relevant contributors in multiple communities. Some pure technology companies will focus on the “right way” of doing things. For Rackspace as a cloud service provider, the right way to do things is the way that best supports our customers. We’re seeing different needs from customers, so we’re pursuing multiple approaches today that meet those needs.